Photo Album Project - How I print our family and kids albums

I decided I wanted to make printed albums after reading Andrea Dekker's blog for 10ish years and seeing how lovely her kids albums were.  I realized quickly that I needed to set standards LOW or I wouldn't finish an album.  My first album has month labels at the start of each month, and barely any text.  My plan was to make a family album each calendar year, and then albums for each of the kids based on their birthdays.  

The first album I printed was Isaac 1-2, printed just after his second birthday.  I did go back and print Isaac 0-1 later, although I had far fewer photos.  I had taken lots of photos of him, but they were mostly random whatsapp photos and not really "nice" photos.  

Three years on, we have a growing collection of albums:

Every month I upload all the photos from the smart-camera into Snapfish, and then I update the two kids albums and the family album.  I generally try to do this in the first two weeks of the month.  The kids albums take about 20 minutes each, I don't usually add any captions and I chuck lots of photos in.  I also take photos of all their nursery art and each month they get a page or two dedicated to all their nursery art.  I throw away 80% of what they bring home from nursery after I take a photo of it.  My house would be overrun with art otherwise.  

I've started to get more involved in the family albums, adding captions and additional details about the photos.  This year I'm writing a short monthly summary on the first page of the album.  I'm not sure I'll keep this up, there is a fine line between making better albums and making my process so involved that I don't want to do them.

I keep reminding myself that done is better than perfect.  My albums have typos.  They sometimes have too many photos. Sometimes I forget which kid did art and put the photo in the wrong book.  But done is better than perfect.

I like flipping through the albums to remember what we did in any year.  It makes me realize that the remembering self and the experiencing self are so different.  As in, there are events I loved but can't really remember, until I see a photo.  And times that were really hard, but that I remember fondly now (for instance, I saw a photo of 6 month old Isaac.  I remember that time as very hard, but he was very *aww* in memory)

The kids can flip through the albums too, and like to read them and talk about it.  Because I can print new ones if needed I am not super precious about them.  If they get broken then it's only money to fix it.  

I always wait until Snapfish offer 50% off (including extra pages!) before ordering.  I had to wait almost a month to print my January album - I think a lot of people make a resolution to print albums.  Eventually Snapfish do a 50% off sale, so the albums are £50-ish instead of £100.  I started this project during Covid - the Covid year was by far the shortest album.  2021 has many more photos than needed, probably because I was so happy to do things again.

I tape any family cards into the back page of the albums.  Our holiday card will be on the back of the family album.  Any birthday cards or birth announcements will be on the back page of the kids albums. 

I am trying to keep the whole process to under 1 hour a month.  It should be fun.  I love printing the albums and it's another thing I look forward to in the fall... Lilah gets hers after her September birthday, Isaac in October, and the family album in January.  

In 2022 I started the family album with a photo of each room of our house and the garden.  I tried to take the same photos in January 2023, so we can see how much our house changes year to year.

We also love the photo albums because it helps us look at photos far more than if we kept it all on google photos or icloud.  I know one can get lost scrolling through photos on an iphone, but there's something lovely about flipping pages.  Plus, I start to resent paying forever storage fees to companies to store my photos - once printed, I know they will last*

*I realize this is a total historian debate.  What's more reliable, microfiche or online portals?  Scans or preserved originals? I find personally my older digital data is not always super accessible, but I know exactly where my family photo albums are

Do you print albums?  How do you store your photos?  Do you take lots of photos or not very many?